Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 4 from 1 user
Re: ECSDA secp256k1 are on borrowed time.
by
Medusah
on 20/07/2025, 19:33:45 UTC
⭐ Merited by pooya87 (4)
Hardware has improved but not enough to make a significant difference in order to make this a possibility. That means your attempt at conveying a sense of urgency is wrong.

I interpret his urgency as to "begin finding consensus".  I too agree that it might take a long time until a quantum computer breaks ECDSA, but we must not wait until it's relatively, possibly feasible.  We cannot upgrade to a quantum-safe algorithm the same way that a Windows update can.  It will take many years.  Just imagine that even if we have everything ready, developers done writing code and miners done signaling, we still need at least one year of nearly optimal consolidations in a hypothetical clogged up network to migrate most of the coins to quantum-safe addresses.  (And that's just hypothetical, it'll take many years for most bitcoiners to move to quantum-safe.)

And I'm not even discussing about the dilemma with the satoshi-era coins and whether to freeze them or not to freeze.